NVIDIA Corp. has now made available the first WHQL driver of the R295 family, the GeForce 295.73. This release comes with support for GeForce 6, 7, 8, 9, 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 Series cards, and for ION GPUs, it's bundled with the PhysX System Software v9.12.0209, and features the following highlights:

- Game-changing performance boost of up to 45% in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, "the fastest selling title in Steam's history"
- Up to 2x performance Mass Effect 3 with SLI technology.
- GeForce-exclusive quality enhancements with ambient occlusion support for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Diablo III, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
- New 3D Vision and SLI profiles for over 50 titles.
- New PhysX software for the best experience in top PhysX titles like Alice: Madness Returns and Batman: Arkham City.

Man those older drivers must have sucked hard if you can get such a performance jump out of new drivers, still great they got it right now but damn :S

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They "sucked so hard" that those drivers, at that time, enables a GTX 560 playable framerates which are higher than what an HD 6970 gets. Going from 280.26 to 285.62 brought almost the same increase in fps performance too, so if they could still get 45% more from that, wow. I doubt it, though. It's the best-case scenario for obvious reasons, hence the "up to" preceding the percentage.

Anyway it's more on the fact that during that time the Nvidia drivers were better than the AMD drivers for Skyrim, rather than the drivers being automatically "great."

They "sucked so hard" that those drivers, at that time, enables a GTX 560 playable framerates which are higher than what an HD 6970 gets. Going from 280.26 to 285.62 brought almost the same increase in fps performance too, so if they could still get 45% more from that, wow. I doubt it, though. It's the best-case scenario for obvious reasons, hence the "up to" preceding the percentage.

Anyway it's more on the fact that during that time the Nvidia drivers were better than the AMD drivers for Skyrim, rather than the drivers being automatically "great."

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Im sorry, who was talking about AMD?
We are talking about Nvidia drivers vs Nvidia drivers.
I guess the big thing we can get out of this is Nvidia comes with its percentage encreases by comparing new drivers with drivers released 5 drivers prior.
Which imo is off.

I mentioned AMD because of your statement: "Man those older drivers must have sucked hard if you can get such a performance jump out of new drivers", which obviously implies that 285.62 "sucked hard", I therefore added that even assuming that you are correct, that 285.62 "sucked hard", it wasn't "enough" to be worse than AMD's drivers at that time. Additionally, I also mention the actual performance increase from the previous beta to that older WHQL drivers. Which was already quite significant, making the promised performance increase between the two WHQL drivers quite optimistic.

Unless of course you have such high standards that the performance increase between the older WHQL driver and it's preceding beta driver still constitutes something that "sucked so hard."

I guess the big thing we can get out of this is Nvidia comes with its percentage encreases by comparing new drivers with drivers released 5 drivers prior.
Which imo is off.

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And which I've also addressed, since going to THAT older WHQL driver from the previous beta already brought much performance increases already, which makes this more recent one quite unlikely to happen.

Has anyone noticed tangible increases in Skyrim performance to match the claims in the release notes?

I'm curious if where Skyrim is CPU limited if there would be any increase. I would expect not, not unless the driver is now able to offload more from the CPU... the intricate workings of graphics drivers are beyond my comprehension.

If my setup determines the answer then I'm running a 1090t, and a 580 - and as I understand it I would expect to be CPU limited at present.